Ran Chen - A Private Life

After a while, I dragged the single wooden chair, which was very sturdy despite its peeling paint, over to the table. Then I sat down, opened my exercise book, and without much enthusiasm started writing.

When Yi Qiu finished fixing herself up, she swayed over to me on her crippled leg, accompanied by the cool peppermint smell of prickly heat powder. She sat on the bed facing me, the table between us, and then she too opened her exercise book.

The two of us had never really talked to each other during class. Because she was two years older than her classmates, and crippled as well, they all made fun of her, even imitating the strange way she hobbled along. But she never got angry, not even when they made her the brunt of their jokes. She appeared to be even more delighted than they were and couldn't stop laughing.

Though she had opened her exercise book, she hadn't started to do her lessons. Rather, she sat there staring at me.

After a while she said, "Ni Niuniu, how come you never say anything?"

I looked up and laughed bashfully.

I said that I never knew what to say.

Yi Qiu said, "If you lose the use of one leg, then you're a cripple; if you lose the use of both legs, then you become an immortal. You can fly."

I didn't really understand what she was trying to say, so I didn't answer.

"There is a kind of hunger that is the same as time. The longer you suffer it, the more it makes you think," she said.

When I still didn't respond, she continued her conversation with herself. "When we're talking to an ox – a 'niu' – we can't use the language of dogs."

I knew that in class Yi Qiu would often laugh uproariously when there was nothing to laugh at, and would frequently say strange things that didn't seem to make any sense. Because she was crippled and because she was older, nobody took her strange talk seriously or paid much attention to her. And even though I was outside the group, I too, of course, didn't know what it was she was trying to say.

I became aware that she was continuing her one-sided dialogue. "One bird makes music, many birds make noise."

After talking for a long time without any response from me, she got bored and turned to her exercise book.

The room became silent for a time, the only sound the quiet scratching of our pens.

A short while later, unable to bear the isolation, Yi Qiu spoke up again. "Ni Niuniu, to tell the truth, it's wonderful to be like you are. Speech is a tangled mess of leaves; only silence is a tree with a solid heart. Too many leaves impede a tree's growth."

I felt that the things she had to say were truly interesting. How could it be that I hadn't found out earlier how much she liked to talk?

I looked up from my exercise book and smiled at her, saying, "I like listening to you talk."

She laughed joyfully, her breasts shaking in rhythm.

Then lowering her voice she said softly, "Ai, do you know why Teacher Ti put just the two of us together as a study group?"

I thought about it for a while, then said, "No."

She said, "Because you and I have something in common."

I felt surprised. "You and I? Something in common? What?"

Though I really had no idea what Yi Qiu and I might have had in common, I ventured, "The only thing different about us and them is our ages: I'm a year younger than the other students, and you're two years older."

She gave a sigh and said, "We are not accepted by the rest of them. We're not part of the group. We're like two strangers standing on the outside. They ignore us."

At this point, I expressed my disagreement. "But we're not the same," I said. "With me, it's because I don't like them." The implication was that it wasn't because they didn't like me.

My pride was asserting itself.

Yi Qiu said, "Your not liking them is the other face of their not liking you. In the end they're the same thing."

"I don't think they're the same."

But even as I spoke, my conviction was already weakening underneath. In my mind, I went over her words again and again. In the end, I was convinced that she was right and made no more objections.

At that point, I suddenly felt that although Yi Qiu gave the appearance of being a sensual and empty-headed fool, in fact, she was the more intelligent of the two of us.

Only many years later, when I reflected on what it was that Yi Qiu and I shared in common at that time, was I able to see that, in fact, we were fundamentally different in nature.

Yi Qiu had strong survival instincts. She understood that regardless of the individual's reasons for doing so, it was self-destructive for a person to cut all ties with surrounding society, that to do so would lead to the danger of isolation, and that any individual who did so ran the risk of withering away. She knew that she had to make every effort to establish a relationship of mutual interdependence and trust with her classmates if her life was to have a solid and healthy foundation. She truly worked hard to bring this about. But because of her disability, she was rejected by this excessively normal and healthy group. Yi Qiu's isolation from this group, clearly, was not her own doing.

On the other hand, my isolation from it was. My behavior stems from a fear of the world outside the self; or, to put it another way, my disability is a mental one. I have never been willing to adopt an exploratory attitude toward the outside world, which would have created opportunities for me to establish real contacts with my companions within the group. Even today, I still have this kind of fear. I am stubbornly unwilling to recognize this fact: to reduce or abandon my concentration on self and open wide the door to socialization within the larger group would be to open the obvious door to my own survival; but, to look at it another way, would be to open the door to my own extinction.

We didn't complete our assignment for that day. Yi Qiu brought out her pictures of her parents to show me. The old-fashioned black-and-white photographs were ragged around the edges and starting to yellow with age. Yi Qiu told me lots of things about her life. Of course, she had heard these things from her uncle.

Yi Qiu's father had been the headmaster of a primary school. He was a big, tall, good man who cut an imposing figure. He was always extremely painstaking, easygoing, thoughtful, and modest and respectful in dealing with people in his school; but underneath, he was very easily upset by the people around him, was cynical and anxiety-ridden, and had no more courage than a mouse. Her mother, a member of a drama troupe, was spirited, cheerful, and attractive, with an aura of sexuality about her. Although she was not well educated and lacked a proper upbringing, she exuded a surface jauntiness and passion that fueled men's fantasies and turned them on, so in the eyes of the local males she was the number one "star," the woman they would fight over. Yi Qiu's father, after chasing her for eight years, finally won her over with his scholarship and his graciousness. They were married in early 1964 and the following year gave birth to little Yi Qiu, who inherited her mother's good looks and her father's submissiveness.

But the times were against them, and the idyllic scene soon ended. In 1968, when little Yi Qiu was three years old, her anxious father could no longer bear the vicious infighting of the political campaign that was going on in the country at that time. He had been ordered to sleep between two corpses, one of them one of his female teachers who had been beaten to death by the Red Guards, the other, the Dean of Instruction of his school, who had "jumped to his death for fear of facing his crime." He was ordered to not only lie between the two corpses but also continuously stroke them so that he could respond to questioning the next day "with a cleansed mind." The night of mental torment cracked his nerves. At the first hint of dawn the next morning, when the guard had dropped off to sleep for a moment, he fled from the cowshed where he was kept and went home. On that cold January morning, before the sun had risen, his depressed and weak spirit suddenly broke and he sank into a deep manic depression, which set the stage for the final bitter scene of the family's extinction.